Immersive visual technology provides for a virtual interactive experience of viewing an image and, mote particularly, inserting an image into another image to produce a realistic immersive experience. Combining multiple images through immersive visual techniques creates a panoramic image, one that covers a wider field of view than would be possible with a conventional camera lens. The common device to capture circular hemispherical still images is a digital camera equipped with a fisheye lens. Such images contain extremely sharp and remarkable amounts of detail. Generally, immersive technology involves interactive photography based upon digital input to a computer processor of photographic images obtained using standard wide angle or fisheye lenses or mirrors to reflect a wide-angle image into a standard lens. The digital processing involves removing any mirror, wide angle or fisheye lens distortion and providing a perspective corrected image portion for viewing at the user's command.
A Fisheye lens used in immersive visual systems is a wide-angle lens that takes in an extremely wide, circular image. Fisheye lens is known in the field of photography for its unique distorted appearance produced in the captured image. The Fisheye lens provides a 180 degree view in an image or a video. The view is usually somewhat distorted, although the distortion may be sufficiently corrected using techniques known in the art. For providing a good immersive experience to a user, a number of immersive visual systems and methods have been proposed.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,947,059 discloses an imaging system comprising a plurality of image capturing devices for stitching and transforming to produce full motion stereoscopic equirectangular image. The method comprises the steps of obtaining a plurality of images, combining portions of first and second image to produce first combined equirectangular image, combining portions of different portion of first image with a portion of the third image to produce second combined equirectangular image and displaying first and second combined equirectangular image in a matter to produce a stereoscopic image.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,147,709 discloses a method for inserting a high-resolution image into a low-resolution image to produce Immersive experience. The method as disclosed by the above patent includes capturing a low resolution image, capturing a high resolution image, dewarping the low resolution using image transformation process, magnifying the details in the image, overlaying the high resolution image, matching pixel values and representing at least three points in high resolution image with three different corresponding values in the low-resolution image.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,795,090 provides a method and system for generating intermediate panoramic images from two original panoramic images, where each panoramic image provides a 360 degree field of view of a scene from different nodal points. First, pairs of planar images are derived, where each pair corresponds to original planar views derived from respective portions of the original panoramic images, where a similar area of the scene is visible from each pair of planar views. Then, an intermediate planar image is generated from each pair of planar images, and the resulting series of intermediate planar images are cylindrically concatenated to form the intermediate panoramic image.
Although the above patents disclose processes and systems to combine or immerse two or more images, none of them provides a flexibility to allow the end image to be displayed on a small screen. This is due to the fact that in most of the known immersive visual systems, stitching of two or more images results in an enlarged equirectangular image. As a result, the resultant image or video requires greater storage space. Moreover, the quality of the end image or video is usually below user expectations. Hence, there is a need for a method and system which facilitates reduction of size of the image file after stitching of two or more images. Also, such a method and system for stitching of two or more images should produce a resultant image of good quality.